Website Link Tactics Glossary

Glossary of Linking Terms, Strategies and Tactics

Website Link - A website link is a simple connection between two websites. Links can be clicked on and if a person clicks on the link then the person will be brought to the site with the link.

Image Link - A link made with an image. This is the type of link that is the most difficult for the search engines to understand.

Text Link - A link made with text. This is the easiest type of link for the search engine to understand. This is the best link because the site being linked to will get credit for the link and the linking text. It is best to use text that is also an important keyword phrase for optimal search engine results.

URL Link - A link made with the actual URL such as www.yourdomain.com. This link is easy for the search engines to understand and to follow but does not have the advantage of helping the site gain position in the search engine for a specific search phrase.

Hyperlink - The technical term for any of the type of links defined above (image, text or URL).

Reciprocal Link - A reciprocal link is an exchange of links. One website gives out a link to another website and receives a link back in exchange. This is done as a link swap or a link exchange or via a link partner.
Google and the other major search engines count the number of links into a site and views these links as votes in favour of both sites.

Relevant Linking - a site linked to another site containing only compatible content and content relevant to the linked site. This is a very valuable type of link.

Three Way Linking - this is a special type of linking. This is when site one links to site two which links to site 3 and then site 3 links back to site one. This approach counts on relationships between the owners of the three sites to make this approach effective.

One-way Linking - This is a link that points to a website without any reciprocal link. This means that the link goes only in one direction. One-way links are harder to acquire than traditional reciprocal links. These types of links pay off nicely in long-term search engine ranking results.

Multi-Site Linking - This is a strategy used by large companies for website promotion. This has evolved from reciprocal linking; it may generate similar one-way links that engages multiple partner sites.

Link Campaign - This is a form of Internet marketing campaign and SEO combined. It may involve mutual links back and forth between related sites. It is an approach that builds links steadily over a multi-month time frame.

Incestuous Linking - This is an SEO technique used by webmasters to endorse a set of their own web sites, or those of close friends. The downfall of this approach is that the webmaster has all (or many of) the sites in a common hosting environment. This may mean that all the sites are on the same server or even worse at the same IP address. This is something that the major search engines check for and if they find this approach being used then they may penalize the offending sites.

Overlinking - It is characterized by too many links from any given page on a website. It also may be an approach with the same term being overused on a webpage with the overused phrase also being a link. The result is an overused link and this could also work against the website receiving the links.

Underlinking - This is the opposite of overlinking. An underlinked page can also be called a "dead-end page". This is a page with no links at all. This can be a bad tactic as you will want to provide a nice path for a human or a search engine spider to visit other relevant content on your site.

Link Doping - This is a practice that results in a large number of unjustified hyperlinks on a website. The pages often make very little sense (hence the term link doping) and typically are not useful to a human and therefore frowned upon by the search engines.

Link Farm - A website or a set of websites with essentially no content except for the links. Typically these sites only use the URL of the home page to create the link. It is an approach that has very little usefulness (perhaps none) to humans and there are often penalties for the site receiving the links if this method is detected by the search engines.

Link Popularity - It is the quantity and quality of other web sites that link to a certain site on the World Wide Web.

Forum Signature Linking - This is a method used to build links to a website by building a link into the signature of someone posting into an Internet discussion forum.

Link Broker - A company that has a program that allows you to buy or rent links. Be sure to use a reputable company here that use multiple websites, links contained within relevant text at unique IP addresses at different hosting environments.
The link brokers that are very low cost probably should be avoided as many shortcuts may have been taken to reduce costs.

Blind Link - This is a deceptive approach and is done through redirection via URL or client-side JavaScript. Links that are not user initiated are frowned on by the search engines.

Blog Comments and Links - These are links found on a blog leading to the individual's website. These can be effective links and are one of the reasons that people blog.

New Window Link - It is best to have any link on your site that goes to another site to come up in a new window. With a new window, if someone "x's" out or closes the new window then they will be right back where they started - on your site.

Anchor Tag - An HTML tag that allows you to create a link to another document or web page or to a bookmark within the current web page.

Google Page Rank - Google PageRankô is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web.

Keywords Words - Keywords are the terms that people use to search for a website. They are also the terms that should be set up on a website page so that the search engines know that the page is related to the keyword(s). Keywords define the topic or the theme of a given web page.

Link Exchange - The process when two websites owners agree to exchange links with one another.

PageRankTM or PR - Google's patented method for measuring page importance on a scale from 0 - 10, where 10 is the highest. The PageRank algorithm analyzes the quality and quantity of links that point to a page.

Visibility Percentage - Visibility Percentage is calculated by dividing the Visibility Score by the maximum possible score that would be achieved if all of your keywords were ranked number 1 for all engines. In other words, if a site was perfectly ranked at number 1 for all keywords on all engines, your Visibility Percentage would be 100%. In contrast, if a site was not ranked in the top 30 for any keywords on any engines, then the Visibility Percentage would be zero.

NO FOLLOW Code - An attribute used in a hyperlink to instruct search engines not to follow the link, or to pass PageRank. Also refers to a Meta Tag that instructs search engines not to follow links found on a page.

Stemming - Search engines such as Google use a process called stemming to deliver results based on a word's root spelling. An example would be similar search results returned for clothes as for the word clothing.

Strategic Linking - A well thought out approach to getting websites to link to yours.

PageRank - Google's unique patented system of predicting the value of a web page's relevance and rank.